Toby Harnden was the Daily Telegraph's US Editor, based in Washington DC, from 2006 to 2011. Click here for Toby's website. Follow him on Twitter here @tobyharnden and on Facebook here. He is the author of the bestselling book Dead Men Risen: The Welsh Guards and the Defining Story Britain's War in Afghanistan.

American Way: Texas execution signals Rick Perry is poised to run for president

If you’re looking for a sign that Governor Rick Perry of Texas is about to run for President of the United States then the execution of one Humberto Leal Garcia is probably it.

By all appearances, Perry didn’t give a damn about the opposition of the Obama administration, the United Nations and the Mexican government. Leal was a Mexican citizen – the reason for the furore – and the Texas governor refused even to take a telephone call from the Mexican ambassador as the death chamber was being readied.

Perry declined to issue a 30-day stay of execution after the Supreme Court voted by the slimmest possible margin of 5 to 4 not to spare the condemned man and Leal duly went to meet his maker an hour after the country’s highest court had ruled.

On the face of it, Perry had every reason to give Leal, who had spent 16 years on death row, another month to live. He could have called the bluff of some of his critics and also presented himself as a potential-be commander-in-chief with a view not only beyond Texas but also stretching farther than American shores.

President Barack Obama had argued that executing Leal would endanger American citizens abroad. This was because Leal, an illegal immigrant who entered the US as a toddler, had not been given the opportunity to have access to Mexican consular officials, a right enshrined in the Vienna Convention.

Perry, who walks and talks like the Marlboro Man, would even have had political cover because President George W. Bush, his predecessor as Texas governor, had reached the same conclusion as Obama.

So why didn’t grant a stay? If he'd been looking for a post-governorship entree into polite society in Washington, he might have assented. But to refuse was consistent with his approach thus far to administering the death penalty. And in terms of running for the White House there would have been no political advantage to do otherwise – as Bush himself and former President Bill Clinton would doubtless attest.

When Clinton was running for president in 1992, he flew back to Arkansas, where he was governor, to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a double murderer who was so mentally impaired that he saved the pudding from his last meal so he could eat it later. A decade later, the Supreme Court ruled that mentally retarded prisoners could not be executed.

Just before Bush’s presidential run in 2000, he resisted calls to save Karla Faye Tucker, a born-again Christian who became the first woman to be executed in Texas in 135 years. When the journalist Tucker Carlson asked Bush about the case, the future president, Carlson reported, pursed his lips in mock desperation as he whimpered and imitated the condemned woman begging : “Please don't kill me."

Neither Clinton nor Bush suffered electorally because of these executions and the former, in particular, probably benefited because it helped neutralise the argument that Democrats were soft on crime.

Two-thirds of Americans support the death penalty, a proportion, incidentally, that is almost identical to that of the British public. Although the Supreme Court has gradually been narrowing the parameters of it – as well as the retarded, no one who was a juvenile at the time of their crime can be executed – it is not an issue of controversy.

It would be hard, moreover, to think of a less sympathetic character than Leal. His victim Adria Sauceda, 16, was raped, bitten, sexually violated with a stick and then had her skull crushed by a huge chunk of asphalt. He was in the US illegally and the matter of his citizenship was not even raised at his trial.

Central to the arguments for a reprieve was that there is pending legislation laying down that a foreign national cannot be executed unless he or she has been accorded their rights under the Vienna Convention. But this legislation has little chance of being passed and the Supreme Court has ruled that until it is the individual states are not bound by the treaty. With the Tea Party pushing of states’ rights and a heightened suspicion of power being concentrated in Washington, Perry’s granting a stay would have gone against the mood in his party and much of the country.

There is every indication that Perry will run for president. He has visited major donors in California, begun to assemble a staff and made calls to power brokers in the first-voting state of Iowa. Sarah Palin is rumoured to be preparing to endorse him.

If he does run, we’ll hear a lot about the Texas death penalty, just as we did with Bush in 2000. There will be much outrage expressed among elites, especially in Britain, but until death penalty opponents can come up with a case in which it can be proved an innocent person was executed then the venting will matter little.

What Perry will be able to concentrate on will be his record of job creation – 1.1 million new jobs in Texas during the decade he has been governor – and contrast it with Obama’s feat of increasing national unemployment from 7.3 percent to 9.2 percent thus far.

If Perry’s opponents want to try to change the subject to the death penalty, then that would probably suit the rugged, cowboy-booted Texan just fine.

Toby Harnden’s American Way column is published in the Sunday Telegraph each week.